Body Cameras: A cloud-storage and video-imaging company is proposing cameras that would automatically activate in response to “triggering events,” such as a car crash or a gun being pulled. The patent for these devices describes how police officers wearing the camera can scan a crowd for faces, running that against a database of wanted people. But what about the expectation of privacy in public spaces?

Snapshot

Michael Donkor’s debut novel Housegirl eschews the aspirational immigrant narrative, instead “weaving together a novel that presents three Ghanaian girls who experience isolation in radically different ways,” writes Hannah Giorgis in her review, which you can find at The Atlantic’s new online home for books coverage. (The book cover is depicted above, in an illustration by Arsh Raziuddin.)

Evening Read

The former Cornell University scientist Brian Wansink has published hundreds of studies over the years aimed at changing the food environment to encourage people to make healthful eating decisions. But his research—now broadly under question, including more than a dozen retractions—harshly reflects a system that rewards buzz over merit:

It’s easy to let down one’s skepticism toward apparently virtuous work. Studies are manipulated and buried and disingenuously designed or executed all the time for commercial reasons, notoriously in domains like pharmaceuticals, where there is a clear incentive to prove that a product is safe and effective—that the years and millions of dollars that went into developing a drug were not wasted, and rather that they were in service of a safe and effective billion-dollar product. But a bulk of the inquiry into Wansink’s research practices centered on a study about getting children to choose fruits and vegetables as snacks if they were marked with stickers bearing popular cartoon characters. Why would someone fabricate a study about how to get kids to eat more fruits and vegetables?